EVOLUTION OF A PITCHER: Cutter made Lester a major threat

Wednesday

Jul 30, 2014 at 12:35 PM

With his fastball and curveball developing and a year of Single-A baseball under his belt, Jon Lester went to minor-league pitching coordinator Goose Gregson in 2004 and asked him whether he could start trying out a cut fastball.

Brian MacPherson Journal Sports Writer brianmacp

Originally published Feb. 24, 2011

FORT MYERS, Fla. - New toys can be fun. New toys can sometimes be too much fun.

With his fastball and curveball developing and a year of Single-A baseball under his belt, Jon Lester went to minor-league pitching coordinator Goose Gregson in 2004 and asked him whether he could start trying out a cut fastball.

Lester had discovered that he needed another breaking pitch - especially one he could use against righties. His curveball was all he really had, and a hanging curveball to a righty can be hit an awfully long way.

Lester had seen fellow lefty Andy Pettitte twirl gem after gem for the New York Yankees, featuring an almost unhittable cutter bearing in on the hands of righties. Once Lester learned the cutter, he couldn't wait to use it. But his ERA, which was 3.65 at Single-A Augusta in 2003, climbed to 4.28 at Single-A Sarasota in 2004. Some of that had to do with his overuse of his new pitch.

"It ended up being like giving a kid a toy - they're going to play with it until it's broke," he said. "That's what I did. It set me back on a lot of things. I threw it too much, so they took it away."

Said Gregson, now the team's Latin American pitching coordinator, "We encouraged him to go ahead and work on the curveball, knowing that, probably down the road, he was going to come up with a pretty good cutter or slider. It was all a part of his early development. He accepted that idea."

Red Sox coaches told Lester in no uncertain terms not to take the pitch to the mound with him in games. They didn't eliminate the pitch from his arsenal, but they told him not to use it until he'd refined it - and figured out how best to use it in game situations.

"We have a policy over here that we never take a pitch away from a pitcher," Gregson said. "We'd lose all kinds of credibility if a pitcher came to us and we said, 'No, you can't use that pitch.' What we maybe have asked guys to do is shelve that pitch for a while, put it in your back pocket. In the case of Jon, we always allowed him to throw two or three in a game - or two or three in his bullpen sessions - while he was developing other pitches."

By the middle of his season at Double-A Portland in 2005, Lester had harnessed the pitch enough to start using it in games again. He flourished with his new weapon, striking out 163 hitters in 148 1/3 innings and compiling a 2.61 ERA. Opposing hitters hit .215 off him. The following season, Baseball America named him the No. 2 prospect in the organization, and the Red Sox refused to include him in the trade that netted Josh Beckett.

His cutter, now his best secondary pitch, had plenty to do with that.

"I was able to throw it under the right circumstances and learn how to use it, as opposed to, 'Hey, I'm in a jam. Throw a cutter,'" he said. "That was the year I learned how to pitch with it instead of just throwing it."

What the cut fastball did was give Lester another breaking pitch - and the hitter something else to think about.

The lefty now throws his sweeping curveball around 78 mph, and he throws his sharp-breaking cutter at around 90 mph. He gets more swings and misses with his curveball, but he gets more weak contact and breaks more bats with his cutter. He can throw strikes more consistently with his cutter, too.

Together, those two breaking pitches made Lester a major-league pitcher.

"I had the luxury of at least being around Steve Carlton when I was a young coach in the Phillies organization," Gregson said. "I always remember him saying that some nights the curveball wasn't working early and the slider was, and about halfway through the game the other breaking ball would come along and he'd seem to lose the feel for the first one. It was always nice, for a big, strong left-hander to have two different looks that he could give a guy - especially when you start getting deep into a ball game."

Like Pettitte, Lester has relied quite a bit on the cutter as he's developed into one of the best left-handed pitchers in the game.

"The Pettitte cutter cuts a little more," said Carl Crawford, who faced each pitcher more than 40 times in his career in Tampa Bay. "But Lester definitely has the power thing going on."

Crawford is probably happy he doesn't have to face Lester anymore -- he is just 9-for-40 in his career against his new Red Sox teammate (a .225 batting average) with just one extra-base hit, a double, three walks and 13 strikeouts.

The extra power behind the cutter makes it one of the best pitches of its kind in the game. Like the curveball for Beckett or the changeup for Clay Buchholz, the cutter has become the pitch for which Lester is best-known. "Pitch value" statistics at FanGraphs.com ranked Lester's cutter as the second-best in the game last season (Cincinnati pitcher Johnny Cueto's cutter was named the best). It's part of who he is.

"He's always had that good cutter," Beckett said. "That was a pitch that they were talking about with him in the minor leagues. I've always known he's had that. It's something that, every time he throws it, he has conviction because it's been a pitch that's been really successful for him in the past."

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

June 4, 2002: Selected by Red Sox in second round (57th overall pick) of MLB Draft.

June 10, 2006: Makes major-league debut, giving up three runs in four-plus innings and getting a no-decision in home loss to Texas Rangers.

September 2006: Doctors at Mass. General Hospital diagnose Lester with treatable form of lymphoma. Lester has chemotherapy treatments in Seattle.

July 23, 2007: Returns to the major leagues for the first time, and picks up a victory over the Indians in Cleveland.

Oct. 28, 2007: Pitches five-plus shutout innings and is the winning pitcher in Game Four of the World Series, as Red Sox complete sweep of Colorado Rockies.